1899 Handbill for a Concert and Cakewalk to Benefit Shippensburg, Pennsylvania’s AME Zion Church

Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Columbia Printing House, 1899. Sheet measuring 6 x 9 inches. Marked verso in pencil. Marginal damage; very good plus.. Handbill advertising a “Grand Concert and Cake Walk” in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, to benefit the AME Zion Church. Newspaper articles date the event to 1899. Shippensburg is a small town in southern Pennsylvania, about thirty miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. By the 1870s African-Americans comprised nearly ten percent of its population, a much higher proportion than the rest of the county and state; at its height, the community had four Black churches.[1] This event, which featured songs, recitations, and a cake walk—a dance created by African-Americans, often thought to satirize white plantation culture—promised to be the “greatest contest ever helled in Shippensburg”.

[1] Steven B. Burg, “‘From Troubled Ground to Common Ground’: The Locust Grove African-American Cemetery Restoration Project: A Case Study of Service-Learning and Community History”, The Public Historian 30, no. 2 (May 2008): 51–82.